Ella met Jeff when she was fifteen years old. He was shy, smart and she loved him because he made her laugh. He was older than her and when he went away to college, he promised that he would come back to marry her. She waited. His parents were killed in a car accident and he left school before getting his degree as a lawyer. He was an only child and so he took over his parents house and went to work at his uncle's furniture store. She married him but in her heart she knew that he no longer loved her because his losses had changed him. They had two children and she brought them up as best as she could without much help from him. He started to drink a short time after their wedding. She had hoped that she could make him happy but he had lost a part of himself and took up drinking to kill his pain. His dreams of being a respectable lawyer and enjoying the good life with her had died with his parents. He went through his days as a salesman without any ambition. He never tried to look for anything else because it was safe and he knew his uncle put up with him because he felt sorry for the way his life turned out. When the children moved on with their lives, she looked at the stranger that she had lived with for thirty one years and made the decision to leave him. He had no respect for their marriage and she knew that he resented her because he had no one else to blame. She had endured his drinking, cheating and verbal abuse for too long. She blamed herself because she should have listened to the little voice inside her head that had told her not to marry him long ago. As a young woman, she had given up her dream to go to college to become a doctor because she thought that he needed her to deal with his parents death. She had tried so hard to make him better but she realized that she had allowed him to use the unfortunate circumstances as an excuse to waste his own life. She walked out the door leaving everything behind except for a few personal belongings. She had saved enough money to move to the city where she intended to start again. At fifty one she knew that it was just a matter of time, before she would recreate her own life. She dyed her hair, put on some lipstick and faced her fears. “You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”~ Eleanor Roosevelt